And suddenly, with no provocation, the hard drive light on the PC just starts going nuts. It’s blinking like an armada of flash bulbs exploding around a Hollywood starlet. What kind of craziness is going on inside there?
Well, of course it’s a computer virus! What else?
It’s probably not a virus, though it could be. Chances are better that it’s the Search command indexing files on the hard drive. It’s a necessary and handy thing that happens at seemingly random times.
Why index?
Recognizing that few humans bother to organize their files, major operating systems now all feature incredible searching commands. These commands can ferret out the tiniest tidbit of text lurking in any file you’ve created, downloaded, or stolen. It’s really amazing, and it’s all possible thanks to the search index.
The operating system updates the index all the time. So it’s not random. No, it’s more opportune; if the system is slow, the operating system starts indexing. That may explain why the hard drive doesn’t seem to randomly blink when you’re using the computer to do multiple things.
Without dragging this blog post out too long (too late), follow these steps to control which files the Search command indexes on your PC’s hard drive:
- Open the Control Panel.
- Switch over to the Icon view, if necessary. Apparently the command you’re looking for isn’t available in the Category view.
- Open the Indexing Options icon.
The Indexing Options dialog box lists folders — locations — where Windows scours files’ names and contents to place into the Search command’s index.
You can click the Modify button to add and remove locations from the Index. Though you be tempted, don’t just slap down Drive C to index everything. That trick works, but it takes Windows forever to index all of Drive C. Instead, keep the locations limited to where your files are stored. In fact, the more precise you are, the faster the Search command works.
To peruse the times when the indexing service runs, you might assume that the Task Scheduler is used. Wrong!
Search indexing is a service in Windows. To peruse its settings you must open the Services icon, found in the Administrative Tools icon, found on the Control Panel. The service is named “Windows Search,” but there’s really nothing you can glean by looking at it. And there are no options you can reset so that indexing takes place at specific times; the service runs all the time.
Oh, and that explains the random blinking hard drive light.
Youre using non-technical terminology to describe the ‘blinking light’. It should be specified that that is the paging unit of the hard drive (Im not a tech guru, so I dont really even know what Im talking about here), and that the purpose of the paging unit is to swap out memory of running programs from RAM to HD memory. This is usually a problem for people who do not have enough RAM, so program memory has to get swapped out. Also I think what you refer to as over use of file searching can be cured by defragging your HD which will put program fragments together in continuous order of HD sectors so it does not have to search around the HD for program segments. So if your paging unit is going off, and you have plenty of RAM and you are not running hardly any programs, chances are that you do have a virus. If you ctrl-alt-del and check your CPU and RAM use and they are both pegged to the top when you are not running any programs, that is also an indicator.
Comment by BradC — November 22, 2012 @ 12:59 am
I do mention looking at the blinking light when switching programs as a way of telling whether or not your PC has enough RAM. I think that trick is mentioned in both PCs For Dummies and my fat Troubleshooting book. Most PCs today automatically run defrag, so I don’t know what to tell people if the light’s running amok and the system isn’t indexing.
Comment by admin — November 22, 2012 @ 10:26 am